Video: Panning and zooming

Since zooming and panning around an image is one of the most common tasks, there's a variety of different ways to accomplish this in Photoshop. Let's start by taking a look at the Zoom tool and the Hand tool. If I tap the Z key, Photoshop will automatically select the Zoom tool, and if I tap the H key, it will select the Hand tool. I'll tap Z again to return back to the Zoom tool. Every time that I click with the Zoom tool by default, Photoshop will zoom in. You can see there's a little plus in the middle of the icon.

In Photoshop CS6 Essential Training, Julieanne Kost demonstrates how to produce high-quality images in a short amount of time, using a combination of Adobe Photoshop CS6, Bridge, and Camera Raw.

The course details the Photoshop features and creative options, and shows efficient ways to perform common editing tasks, including noise reduction, shadow and highlight detail recovery, retouching, and combining multiple images. Along the way, the course explores techniques for nondestructive editing and compositing using layers, blending modes, layer masks, and much more.

Panning and zooming

Since zooming and panning around an image is one of the most common tasks,there's a variety of different ways to accomplish this in Photoshop.Let's start by taking a look at the Zoom tool and the Hand tool.If I tap the Z key, Photoshop will automatically select the Zoom tool, and if Itap the H key, it will select the Hand tool.I'll tap Z again to return back to the Zoom tool.Every time that I click with the Zoom tool by default, Photoshop will zoom in.You can see there's a little plus in the middle of the icon.

If I hold down the Option key or the Alt key, the plus turns to a minusand now I can go ahead and zoom out.If I click and hold over an area of my image, Photoshop will continue to zoom inuntil I let go of the mouse.You can see here I've zoomed in so far that we're seeing a pixel grid overlay.Now if I want to zoom out, I can click and drag to the left in order to zoomout, or I can click and drag to the right to zoom in.This is considered the Scrubby Zoom and we can see the option in the Options bar.

If I uncheck that, what that enables me to do is actually click and drag arounda specific area that I want to zoom in to.But now if I want to zoom out, I can no longer drag left, so I actually have touse another keyboard shortcut, maybe the Command+Minus in order to zoom back out.Still, I do like the ability to be able to drag around a certain area to zoom in,but again, it's that zooming back out that kind of suffers.So I do like the Scrubby Zoom so that I can zoom in or zoom out, depending onwhere I want to navigate to my image.

When you do zoom into your image, you'll notice that on the right-hand side andin the bottom, you've got your scroll bar so that you can move around yourimage quite quickly.Another handy shortcut would be to hold down the spacebar--that willtemporarily access the Hand tool--and now I can move around my image in twodirections at one time.You'll notice that when I click and let go, the image continues to move for amoment. That's called Flick Panning. If you don't like that, you can choose toturn that off in the Preferences, underneath the General Preferences, and thendisable the Flick Panning.

I actually like it, so I'm going to keep it on and click OK.I think the two most common views are either fit to screen, where you see thewhole image, or 100%, so that you're looking at every pixel in the image.You can find these underneath the View menu. Here is Fit on Screen andActual Pixels, and we can see that the keyboard shortcut is Command+0and Command+1.So to quickly Fit on Screen, I'll use Command+0--that'd be Ctrl+0on Windows--and if I want to zoom into 100% we'll use Command+1.

If you don't want to remember those keyboard shortcuts, you can alsodouble-click on the Hand tool in order to zoom out to fit in screen ordouble-click on the Zoom tool to zoom in.So as you can see, there are a variety of different ways to zoom and panaround your images.You probably won't use them all; instead, you'll find one that you're mostcomfortable with and use it over and over again.

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